It's December of 2023, and Republicans are riding high. A spate of positive polling results for both Donald Trump and the party as a whole have GOP voters predicting another coming red wave. If it all sounds familiar, that's because it is. 

Is a storm coming, though? That was the topic of discussion between Jesse Kelly and Steve Deace recently, and I think the segment should be required viewing for Republican voters. 

There is A LOT on the line in the 2024 election and it's time to face some hard truths. In this special @JesseKellyDC delivers those hard truths and explains what needs to be done.

Featuring special guests: @SteveDeaceShow, @AuronMacintyre & @nedryun. pic.twitter.com/QXRpbew8IN

— The First (@TheFirstonTV) December 16, 2023

I won't belabor this article by giving a full transcription, but the discussion revolved around one simple point: Republicans do not understand the enemy they are up against, and they are severely underestimating what's coming.

The most obvious example involves the criminal cases against Donald Trump. How many times have you heard in the last few months that justice will prevail? That he'll beat all the charges. That the Supreme Court will step in to save him. That there's no chance he'll actually be put in prison. Those crazy Democrats would never go that far!

Here's a bit of Deace lambasting the naivete being shown on the right. Be sure to watch the video if you can because, before this section, he perfectly lays out the Democrat game plan step by step.

DEACE: This is the plan, and if you have a brain, and you're willing to see it objectively, it is very obvious. Now, it's not a foolproof plan. These people are largely fools. They just look brilliant because they often go unopposed. When you're not opposed, you look brilliant, you win every chess match when the other guy doesn't make any moves. 

So we don't have to sit here and suffer this fate, but we need a plan, and our plan needs to be more than "this gets me the most clicks on Twitter, this gets me the most votes on iTunes, this gets me booked on Fox News tonight." We're gonna need more than a plan tonight, Jesse, because the people we're up against are not simply doing this for profit or business, but it's a real movement. It's a dark one, and they're going to execute their plan no matter how many clicks you're accumulating over here.

Does anyone really think the DOJ suddenly discovered what ethics were when it slapped Hunter Biden with a bevy of charges? These are the same people who tried to let him completely off the hook just months prior. As Deace notes, charging Hunter Biden allows Democrats to message from the high ground. "Well, we prosecuted the president's son, so clearly all these political prosecutions are fair." That will be the line, and it will be persuasive, not to you, but to the squishy moderates who ultimately decide elections.

Do you really think an army of suburban voters who couldn't even stand up to refuse to wear a mask during COVID-19 are going to suddenly rush to polls to vote for Donald Trump because they believe he's being persecuted? We are talking about the same people who suffered lockdowns and still killed the red wave in 2022. What part of that demographic says they will suddenly shift to Trump in the face of the over a billion dollars of negative advertising Democrats are set to release when the time is right? 

I'm not telling you who to vote for. Heck, let's assume Trump is a foregone conclusion as the nominee. If that's the case, then we need a better plan than spending all our donor money on legal fees and attending UFC matches. Am I cynical about all this? You're dang right I am. I'm not going to pretend the clouds aren't dark on the horizon just because it's sunny at the moment.

Toward the end of the segment, Kelly points out that Republicans simply do not recognize or respect how far Democrats are willing to go to retain power, and he's right. They aren't going to stop short of putting Trump in jail, and they aren't going to not remove him from some swing-state ballots once he's convicted. So the GOP better figure out a way to compete financially, and they better have a backup plan next summer if ballot access is restricted due to the machinations of blue state attorneys general.

Heed the warning or don't. I'm just here to get it on record.